I have a very good friend, a man in his 80’s who puts me to shame with his level of physical activity. Robust guy. Hardly ever sick; had a knee replaced back along. Never drinks water unless absolutely necessary. Doesn’t trust it; only drinks beer. (I’ve known him for more than a decade and never seen water pass his lips.)
Born in the Netherlands, he survived - as a teenager - the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands AND toward the end of the war, with Hitler just months away from departing for Hell, the Nazi army on the ropes, the Hunger Winter of 1944 - the great Dutch famine in the winter of 44.
A Dutch geologist by profession who first worked in the Dutch colonies in the Indian Ocean and South America then spending 40 years, give or take, living in the U.S. An oil hunter in the Canadian Upper Arctic and Canadian and U.S. High Plains for the likes of Royal Dutch Shell, Mobil, Exxon, et al. In his later years, serving as a mining consultant and serving on Federal and State government geological surveys. With a son, a successful U.S. Marine Corps staff officer (graduate of the Marine War College at Quantico) though my friend returns to the “old country” at least once a year, a couple of years back he bit the bullet and became an American citizen.
The most brilliant guy I currently know. We discuss virtually everything. Geology, Sex, Politics (U.S. and European), and Religion. He, being both put off by the Roman Catholic Church and the Dutch Reformed Protestant Church, has little use for God though he has attended church with my wife and I.
Just yesterday, I was asking if he knew of Jacobus Arminius, whom I rediscovered is the Reformation theologian on whose interpretation of Scripture most but not all non-Calvinists understand the Faith under Protestantism. Arminius was Dutch, born 1560, in Oudewater, Utrecht province, Southeast of Amsterdam. My friend is a fount of European history, but not so much of Reformation history. Never heard of Arminius. In fact he thought I was asking about the Armenian people of Armenia.
In the process of our conversation, talking about Scripture, implying why he doesn’t believe, he says to me, “You know, when you tell stories about your great grandfather, you embellish those stories for one reason or another. Who knows the truth?”
He simply can’t believe, knowing that the New Testament was written 60 to 100 years after the time of Christ. It is irrational to believe in God, Christ or Scripture when the alleged writers were men in the first century. Irrationality, by the way, is the same position of most unbelievers and non-believers who do not plead the hypocrisy of Christians as the reason for their beliefs.
To which I responded:
“Well, yeah. But I believe in the inspiration of the Scriptures. It wasn’t one man or a cabal who sat down and just shared their human thoughts and feelings on paper. If it were, they were either incredibly brave or stupid; to do something that could get them arrested at dinner and executed before lunch the next morning. I believe it was the Holy Spirit who told the writers what to write. God’s lips to their ears, so to speak. And this is Faith. You can’t prove your position nor disprove mine. And I can’t prove my position nor disprove yours.
“But,” I said, “My reason for belief is the consistency and complexity of the Scriptures from cover to cover.”
This is a rational belief based upon my thorough study and understanding of the source material. That the Bible is the inerrant word of GOD is a belief I have reached by my capacity to reason.
To be absolutely clear, I have reasoned that because the narrative, the message, is internally consistent, over the course of history both Testaments cover, I can believe what it says about the subjects it covers.
Further, I reasoned that because I found it to be internally consistent it would be impossible for human men, using human reasoning or even other religious philosophy(s) or a combination of things, who were separated by time, distance and the inability to readily communicate/co-ordinate to maintain the consistency of the narrative from Genesis 1:1 to the last verse of the book of the Revelation of St. John without some sort of supernatural agency, namely God.
I don’t pretend to know, I probably could go back to an old college textbook or google it, but I suspect, that at least some of the men at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., used the same rationale to check the leading of the Holy Spirit in determining what was and wasn’t Divinely inspired.
Martin Luther argued that the books known as the Apocrypha included in Catholic Bibles between the Old and New Testaments were NOT inspired. I don’t know Luther’s objections but a reading of the Apocrypha is NOT, at least from my understanding, consistent with the narrative of Scripture. In fact, I find it a rather jarring interruption.
Since Luther objected and by this time the Protestant Reformation was in progress, Rome, seeking to form a counter-reformation, called the Council of Trent (mid 1500’s) to, among other things, re-assert the divine inspiration of the Apocrypha.
My rational act, my human act of reasoning, was NOT about what the Bible says but about how the message, over the millennia was consistent within itself, i.e., it didn’t contradict itself between books or as a whole.
Acts of creation, a world wide flood with a wooden boat saving humanity and all the creatures of the earth, God communicating with Moses in a burning bush that didn’t burn, a nation hit with 10 plagues as leverage to allow the freedom of the Jews, the people of God, the people of God once freed, wandering in the desert for 40 years, culminating in God sending His Son to teach then die on a cross then to be resurrected for the spiritual salvation of all mankind...why yes, that all sounds kinda, well, crazy. Certainly irrational as any Atheist would be more than happy to tell you.
Another act of reasoning: if the Bible were a mere fable, a story made up by one man or a cabal, then the acts of science, the laws of physics the Bible seem to contradict, would NOT harmonize. I believe they DO HARMONIZE, at least sufficiently for my reasoning.
Of course to the person determined not to make an honest, unbiased and thorough study of the Bible, they do NOT and never will harmonize. (A recently read quote by Stuart Chase: “For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.”)
However, my reasoning then said, If the Bible is not a fable, not man made then the “miracles” have to harmonize with what I know of science and physics.
Before I went off to Bible college, I accepted as fact that the earth was 4 billion of years old, give or take an eon or two. (And I still do.)
So how could creation be accomplished in six 24 hour days as is the current, almost fanatical (irrational?) claim of Evangelical Christians?
Could it be really be possible that all means of measurement of age - the methods used to gage the age of the Universe, the sedimentary record of earth and the fault of various methods of dating - are wrong? That they are presuppositions maliciously and irrationally made by archaeologists, cosmologists, astrophysicists and geologists simply to defend and harmonize Darwin’s theory of evolution with science alone and against Scripture, as is the Creationist accusation. (Because, you know, that the sole raison d’etre of science is not to further human knowledge of the cosmos and the world and humanity but simply to attack and demean Christians, right? Can you tell my last question was facetious?)
Human reasoning, rationality says NO. I can’t accept it’s all a fraud, nevertheless, I believe in creation as the Bible tells it, right down to the appearance, sans evolution, of man (and woman) in the Garden.
How? All I have to do is remove the presupposition in the Creationist argument that the days were 24 hour days because our days are 24 days long now. (I find it rather insulting to limit an allegedly omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient deity, who until Moses was nameless and I think HE was reticent to tell Moses even when Moses asked. Exodus 3:12-14 I can just hear a hint of annoyance, a little exasperation in GOD’s voice. An oy vey iz mir and a facepalm of the Great I AM. Taoism’s scripture, the Tao Te Ching, states that the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. I AM WHO I AM is not so much a name as a statement of being: I think therefore I am.)
Then again, I cannot accept Darwinian evolution. But my not accepting Darwin does not mean I believe that all the earth and space sciences are frauds and their disciples charlatans. And I don’t think Darwin was a charlatan either.
In 1997, two geophysicists from Columbia University put forward the hypothesis of the flooding of the Mediterranean Sea by the Black Sea at the Bosphorous around 5600 B.C. which would have flooded the Levant. It is known as the Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis. They have critics in their fields but as far as I aware at this time, no one has been able to disprove the Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis.
But what about rain? The Bible says it rained, not that the sea rose. Well, if the sea rose, because of ice over a mile thick over all of Eurasia that was melting and flowing into the Black and Caspian seas due to global warming, who knows what the atmosphere was like? I wasn’t there. From where I’m from, heat and humidity under certain conditions in the summer produce violent thunderstorms with deluges of rain and wind.
And what about Noah and thousands of birds and land animals in a boat covered inside and out with tar and had no means of steering that was 450 feet long X 75 feet wide X 45 feet high? For 40 days?
What about it?
Quantum & theoretical physicists have hypothesized that quantum events have to be observed to be “real” and to have happened; that the Universe is not the only Universe, nor this dimension the only dimension. (I’m with them, by the way. It goes along with insulting an all powerful deity by limiting ITS powers through imperfect human reason. But I digress.)
Atheist film writer, director and producer Joss Whedon (Who abandoned Starfleet to do Star Wars movies - a pox on him, maybe. I reserve judgment until I have seen both the next Star Trek movie and the next Star Wars installment.) provided a “quantum science” answer to the Noah story in his TV show, Firefly, about a spaceship, its contrarian captain, eclectic crew and their passengers. River, one of the show’s principal characters and a passenger was trying to “fix” the Bible - by tearing out pages of the Bible that didn’t make sense to her. She was a raving genius and much didn’t make sense to her - or rather the writers who put the words in her mouth. When stopped by Shepherd Book, the unofficial ship’s chaplain and fellow passenger, whose Bible she was frantically ripping apart, she said this about the Ark: “We'll have to call it early quantum state phenomenon. Only way to fit 5000 species of mammal on the same boat.”
Indeed. Dr. Who’s Tardis, the cartoon and circus clown car, Harpo Marx’s coat, Flat Space Dimensional Compressional technology of the movie Ultraviolet. All things that are bigger on the inside than their outward size would accomodate. Why not the quantum reality in the ark? Remember, let’s try not to insult GOD.
Augustine said, “Miracles happen, not in opposition to Nature, but in opposition to what we know of Nature.”
So, creation, Noah, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (hypothesized as being destroyed by an historic meteor shower), the 10 plagues of Egypt - most if not all of which can be explained as non-supernatural events - taking into account Augustine’s quote as a presupposition, I have zero problem with the miracles as they can neither be definitively proven or disproven. And especially the healings, the speaking in many foreign tongues on the day of Pentecost and of course the death and resurrection of Christ. If God created us, He must know of our curiosity, of our inherent need to make sense of all things. HE gave us reason.
I have no trouble using reason to reason that eventually all the miracles of the Bible can be explained by atheistic (and non-atheist) scientists. Will that make them any less miracles? Possibly to those who “prove” the miracles are nothing more than “tricks” of natural phenomena but to me the scientific explanation only serves to further increase my belief in the consistency of the Scriptures and of the existence and power of GOD.
The Holy Spirit through Peter said to be prepared to give reason for your faith to anyone. (I Peter 3:15.16). Of course, my reason is NOT by my reasoning but a call of the Holy Spirit to convict me of my sin, to believe in Christ and to serve Him as His disciple, slave, ambassador and minister. It is manifestly irrational but then again, it is Faith.
My reason is that God sent His son, Jesus, to earth to live as we live, to be tempted as we are tempted so that He may empathize with His creation. And then offered Jesus up as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, for my sins, who then died, was buried and was raised from the dead in three days and who now lives in the inapproachable light of GOD.
Yes, my reason has helped me to believe, like “doubting Thomas,” who, having put his fingers in the wounds of Christ fell down before Him and exclaimed, “My Lord and my God!” This probably pleased Jesus greatly, to see Thomas get faith. Be careful what you wish for, eh? But then Jesus continued to say blessed are those who have never seen me but believe! (John 20:26-29)
No one had Bibles in the first three centuries and then up to the 19th century, few people had them. And still, the Faith flourished. It’s because faith in “the word” is not required to believe; only faith in “the Word,” the ho logos of John 1, Jesus.
Further, no one comes to Jesus to be His disciple by “irresistible grace,” Ya just can’t help yourself, Calvin asserted in his Five Points,
Jacobus Arminius disagreed: A summation from Wikipedia of “Classical Arminianism,” says, “The offer of salvation through grace does not act irresistibly in a purely cause-effect, deterministic method but rather in an influence-and-response fashion that can be both freely accepted and freely denied.”
Note Arminius’ idea above - the offer of salvation is by “influence-and-response.” While from what I have read of the Calvinist vs Arminian “fight” I would presume whoever wrote the summation wrote from the aspect of what God does or doesn’t do but Snarky Prophet soteriology says it is not only God who influences and “woos” but the lives of the disciples of Christ, demonstrating the Love of God in their lives. Indeed, the Holy Spirit through Paul, exclaims: “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.” (Galatians 5:6. from the NIV)
While not stated in Scripture, to my reason it is manifest that the Love of God is so beautifully seductive and those who demonstrate through their lives, equally so...
Almost irresistible but not quite, my brother Calvin.
Until next time, same Bat URL,
May the Peace of Christ be with you,
† Scott, V.D.M, ev
BTW, Keep your lists close by. What if You Believe You Don’t Sin will continue. GOD is my managing editor and He had something else to say at the moment. Go figure - the inffable, nameless deity. Oy!
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